Incomparable Scenery
Comparative Views in the White Mountains
The Belknap Mill Society
Sunday, August 15, 1999 through Thursday, September 30, 1999
Moat Mountain
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| Benjamin Champney | Edmund Darch Lewis |
North Moat from
North Conway |
North Moat from
North Conway |
[Click on the image for an enlargement]
| The difference in emphasis between these two paintings of Moat Mountain is dramatic. Lewis chose a hazy summer day where the heat is palpable. Champney portrayed the distant approach of a fall storm. While Lewis focused attention on the size and grandeur of the Moats, also evident in the painting’s size, Champney chose to use a smaller canvas and emphasize the foreground with its colorful array of fall grasses. Lewis used a large, dramatic sky to convey a sense of vastness. Champney's painting is, somehow, more intimate and personal — imagine someone seated on the big, foreground rock. However, nothing in Champney's painting portrays human presence of any kind. The Lewis painting, painted nearly twenty years earlier, shows people, a church, a path — all signs of civilization. In these paintings, Champney and Lewis chose to depict Moat Mountain in dramatically different ways. |
The Exhibition
[About the Exhibit] [Artists] [Paintings]